Friday, July 28, 2017

MRA likes Justice Ginsburg opinion

On any given day, tens of thousands of men are fighting in family courts to remain in their children’s lives. They argue their cases before biased judges, who apply biased laws, in a system built around that idea that mothers are the more important parent, and that fathers’ proper familial role is limited to mailing a child-support check. Many men lack the financial resources to even fight, as legal expenses can easily run into the thousands before even a single court date.

It is against this bleak landscape that the United States Supreme Court issued in June 2017 a promising new father’s rights case, Sessions v. Morales-Santana. ...

The Morales-Santana case strikes down a legal preference received by mothers over fathers, finding that it violated the fathers’ rights to equal protection under the US Constitution. The case is one of only a few Supreme Court cases that have decided family-law issues on the basis of fundamental rights, making it especially important because the constitutional principles it sets out will now apply to all laws, both state and federal, everywhere in the country. The Court seems to have used this case to make a deliberate statement about father’s rights. ...

The decision stands for the principle that it is unconstitutional for the law to assume either that: (1) unwed fathers are less qualified, entitled, or willing than mothers to take responsibility for their children, or (2) the mother’s relationship with the child is more important than the father’s.

Here is the court's actual reasoning:

(1) At the time §1409 was enacted as part of the Nationality
Act of 1940 (1940 Act), two once habitual, but now untenable, assumptions pervaded the Nation’s citizenship laws and underpinned judicial and administrative rulings: In marriage, husband is dominant, wife subordinate; unwed mother is the sole guardian of a nonmarital child. In the 1940 Act, Congress codified the mother-as-soleguardian perception for unmarried parents. According to the stereotype, a residency requirement was justified for unwed citizen fathers, who would care little about, and have scant contact with, their nonmarital children. Unwed citizen mothers needed no such prophylactic, because the alien father, along with his foreign ways, was presumptively out of the picture. Pp. 9–13.

(2) For close to a half century, this Court has viewed with suspicion laws that rely on “overbroad generalizations about the different talents, capacities, or preferences of males and females.” Virginia, 518 U. S., at 533. No “important [governmental] interest” is
served by laws grounded, as §1409(a) and (c) are, in the obsolescing view that “unwed fathers [are] invariably less qualified and entitled than mothers” to take responsibility for nonmarital children. Caban v. Mohammed, 441 U. S. 380, 382, 394. In light of this equal protection jurisprudence, §1409(a) and (c)’s discrete duration-of-residence requirements for mothers and fathers are anachronistic. Pp. 13–14.

No, I do not think that the 1940 Act relied on those assumptions.

The Act was about citizenship, and it gave weight to demonstrable objective ties to the USA. Such as spending 9 months in the womb of a citizen. Or marriage to a citizen.

Unwed dads may be just as qualified and willing to take responsibility, but it is not evidenced in the legal documents, and the law reasonably gives weight to the legal documents.

The court opinion was written by Ginsburg, a follower of the strain of Jewish feminism that denies human nature in favor of equality principles. The MRA movements seems to be adopting the values of the left by pleading those same equality principles.

The opinion complains about the “obsolescing view that unwed fathers [are] invariably less qualified and entitled than mothers”, but mothers usually win child custody in court anyway. Why is that?

Ginsburg is attacking a straw man, as no one ever say dads were "invariably less qualified".

The net effect if the opinion is to make it harder for women to pass American citizenship to their kids.

Citizenship law ought to take into account realities of human nature. That's just my opinion, and I guess no one cares about that. I did not see any criticism of this court decision, even tho it is anti-nature, anti-marriage, anti-woman, and anti-citizenship. The common sense of Congress 50 years ago is no longer defended.